Where Liberalism Is Alive and Well!

Republican Party

Recorded on January 16, 2013, we pontificate about diversity in the President’s cabinet, Newtown & gun safety, the latest “Emo” opportunism, Lance Armstrong and the ongoing fun of watching the wheels come off the Republican party. Notice we now have an RSS Feed (upper-right column). Go on, give us a listen.

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This clip is all kinds of awesome. You may have seen it in other places, but if not, this is my gift to you. If Republicans were smart, and most aren’t, they would listen to Rachel’s advice. Take it away Rachel…

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I thought I’d put down a few thoughts before tomorrows important election. I’ve been sick for the last week with a terrible cold and it has interfered with my plans to post like hell in the lead up to the election.

This race has been fascinating in so many ways. The Republican party is in shambles, with no adult supervision or guidance. Mitt Romney is a pathological liar with money, a dangerous combination.

Many books will be written about this election and I’ve been thinking hard of writing one myself. I’ve also thought about a documentary or two surrounding what happened in 2012. So many ideas, so little time.

I’m particularly fascinated by the collective failure of the media to do their jobs. In my 50 years on this planet, I’ve never seen anything like it. Sure, there are examples of some great journalists who have done awesome work over the last year, but as a group, the media has failed miserably by all standards.

I thought I’d direct you to some great reads that I’ve come across over the last few days of blowing my nose, coughing and sneezing.

If you haven’t heard about or read the piece by Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei in Political titled “Lessons Learned from 2012”, you should go take a look at it. In my opinion, they are basically outing themselves as racists…but they probably don’t even realize it. In many ways, they are revealing what many other journalists have been more subtle about when they talk “demographics” in polls and particularly that all important “white vote”. Several people have written responses to it, including Steve Benen at the Maddow Blog and Joy-Ann Reid from The Grio.

The idea that Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy was the reason for Romney’s momentum coming to and end is a bunch of crap, if you ask me. I never saw his “momentum” after the first debate as anything more than what it was, a media hyped bounce – one kept afloat by the hot air coming out of most of the media, left and right, and of course the Romney campaign as well. The great Nate Silver had a go at that idea at his NYT’s Fivethirtyeight blog. Go give it a read.

The entire line of attack seems rather sad — it’s more forced than sincere — but the larger takeaway is that the Romney campaign has spent months chasing after every shiny object that catches their eye.

This campaign is going to be about “the private sector is doing fine”! Wait, scratch that, it’s going to be about “you didn’t build that”! Oh, actually, on second thought, it’s going to be about the “redistribution” quote from 1998! Hold on, now it’s going to be about “you can’t change Washington from the inside”! On second thought, it’s going to be about “not optimal”! No, wait, it’s going to be about characterizing developments in the Middle East as “bumps in the road”!

This is precisely why I’ve compared Team Romney to small children playing soccer, running wildly to wherever they see a bouncing ball, whether it’s strategically wise or not. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a campaign taking advantage of new opportunities, but haphazardly shifting from one out-of-context sound bite to another is evidence of an unfocused candidate in search of an effective message.

I’ve been camped out at Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog for the last couple of weeks. As I’m sure most of you know, he looks at all the polls and sorts through them to come up with damn accurate predictions. As of this moment, 6:29 pm, he has President Obama’s chances of winning at 86.3% and his projected electoral tally at 307.2. Because he doesn’t play the game of bouncing from one poll to the next but rather combines them, weights them and comes up with more accurate estimates, many in the media aren’t big fans. They of course rely on the latest poll to write their stories for them and Nate just takes all the air out of their balloons. Pundits have taken some shots at him recently. He took one back at them as quoted in this piece.

Bain Capital, under Romney’s leadership, had one goal: take the money and run. More specifically, their highly successful process goes like this:

Take over a company

Borrow millions against the assets

Procure millions more in taxpayer funded grants and low-interest loans

Put the millions in grants and loans in their pockets

File for bankruptcy and hightail it out of town, asap

Kinda sleazy if you ask me…did you ask me?

Barack Obama could have headed to New York, Wall Street or anywhere he wanted to after serving as the president of the Harvard Law Review…kind of a nice resume piece, you know. But instead, he chose to go to Chicago and help people. Two years after leaving Harvard, he took a job with a church based organization called the Developing Communities Project, which was a group of Catholic charities formed to help people suffering through layoffs and plant closings in the Chicago area. The project went on to win many awards and help countless people in Chicago pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Barack Obama then went on to teach constitutional law and entered the state legislature where he began his career in politics, continuing his goal of helping people.

So yeah, there is a clear difference between President Obama and Governor Romney. I go with the guy who helps people, how about you?

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With the passing of Senator Arlen Specter, I was reminded of the “magic bullet theory” he devised while working for the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. I couldn’t help but see a parallel to Mitt Romney’s singular solution to all the country’s problems – more tax cuts for the 1%. He believes that cutting tax rates that benefit the wealthy disproportionately and rolling back regulations that President Obama put on Wall Street after the 2008 crash, will somehow fix everything.

Let’s call Romney’s one point plan what it is, TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS. The belief that if we just coddle the rich, they will, in their benevolence, share the wealth with the rest of us by supposedly creating jobs. Just ignore that new Jaguar they are driving, or the 4th home in the Hamptons or the Rolex watch that is weighing down their Bermuda tanned arms. It will trickle. Really!

Mitt Romney is a walking example of how greed and selfishness only creates more greed and selfishness.

Businesses don’t create jobs unless there is a demand for their products or services. It would be fucking stupid to do it otherwise. It’s why they do market analysis and studies to determine whether there is demand. When there is demand, businesses expand and create jobs. No demand, no reason to expand. Any business person who says they will create jobs if we just give them more disposable income is applying Romney’s “greed is good” principle and probably has an eye on a new car or vacation home.

If the government were to invest in rebuilding our infrastructure – roads, bridges, schools, railroads and other foundations of our country that we all rely on – real people will get those jobs like construction workers, teachers, contractors, firefighters, suppliers of the materials for the projects and many more businesses that support those industries. And when those people receive their paychecks, they will create demand for products and services and give a reason for the 1% to actually invest in new jobs. We don’t have to rely on their benevolence, they will do it because it makes business sense.

The most widely cited studies include those by the Congressional Budget Office, economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, and economists James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote. These reports find a range of values for each program. In these studies, the “bang for the buck” value—what economists call the “multiplier,” or how many dollars of economic activity is fueled by one dollar spent—for overall social protection ranges from 0.8 to 2.31. Separately, Blinder and Zandi report a value of 1.61 for unemployment insurance and 1.74 for food stamps.[2]

Research by Urban Institute economist Wayne Vroman estimates that one dollar spent on unemployment insurance fuels between 1.7 and 2.1 dollars of activity in the overall economy.[3] According to these studies, the value for a dollar of spending on infrastructure ranges from 1 to 2.5, while the value for aid to state and local governments ranges from 0.7 to 1.8.

The analyses value middle-class tax cuts, such as the Making Work Pay tax credit that gave tax credits of $400 ($800 for couples), as generating between 0.6 and 1.5 dollars of additional economic activity; the value of extending the Alternative Minimum Tax patch for high-income earners for an additional year ranges from 0.2 to 0.6 dollars of additional activity. And the analyses value the extension of the housing tax credit for first-time homebuyers, providing credits up to $8000, in the Recovery Act from 0.3 to 0.9.[4]

As you can see, putting money in the hands of consumers who will spend that money does a lot more to spur economic activity. Handing money over to the rich and hoping they create jobs with it is just plain stupid.